A Song for Darkwood 4

A Song for Darkwood 4 will the fourth edition of the preselection event used to select a entry for Darkwood in the Maia Song Contest. It will return after a year-long absence, and the winner will represent the country in Maia Song Contest 17.

Format
The preselection was planned far ahead of time, to ensure that everything ran smoothly. In order to select the 10 competing entries, the GMBN held an untelevised show of auditions for the selection. The jury that selected their favorites consisted of several broadcaster personnel, some former Darkwood representatives and other prominent musicians.

The voting system was done in the standard Maia Song Contest fashion. There were talks of potentially having a super final in the show, where the top three songs of the first round would advance, however, this was not used.

The presenter of the show will be singer and former Darkwood representative Mika Newton. The venue was Skyview Arena in Star Hill, host of all previous shows of A Song for Darkwood.

The opening act of the show will be IU, the representative in Maia Song Contest 16. She will perform a medley featuring her entry "Twenty-three", as well as her other two biggest hits, "Palette" and "Good Day".

The GMBN revealed that Kamil Show from Lazanistan will perform as an interval act. She will promote her Maia Song Contest entry "Puerto Rico". Other acts have not been announced at this point.

Participants
The participants were revealed on February 26th, 2018. Two artists, Kylie Minogue and Japanese Breakfast, represented Darkwood in the Maia Song Contest 2 and 12 respectively. Dan Croll, originally from Arkaystia, auditioned for the selection after great success in the Darkwood music scene throughout 2017. Therapie TAXI performed their entry in French, the only non-English language in the selection.

After Femme was revealed as a participating artist, many fans called for her to instead perform the NZCA Lines remix version of her song "S.O.S.", which also reached the top ten of Darkwood charts in 2016, and caused her to be the first artist to ever have two versions of the same song in the top ten in Darkwood. Femme responded and stated that she would still perform the original song, but would be happy to perform the remix if invited to at a later time.

Final
The playlist is here

The recap is here